Geir Johnson

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Geir Johnson (13 June 1953 – 16 September 2021) was a Norwegian composer, writer and culture initiator who lived at Nesodden outside Oslo. Born in Fredrikstad, he trained as a soprano soloist in boys’ choirs in Oslo, then studied piano, singing and choral conducting with Knut Nystedt. His career included conducting, roles as a singer and keyboard player in a rock band, and work as a performance artist with The TRASH Ensemble. He studied musicology, philosophy and social sciences at the University of Oslo and the University of Bergen, earning a Ph.D. in 1983. He was a visiting scholar at Stanford’s CCRMA in 1988–1989 and was invited as a visiting composer to the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio in 2010. He wrote more than 60 works as a largely self-taught composer.

Johnson was active in concert planning and management. He worked at the Henie-Onstad Arts Centre in the early 1980s, then helped establish the BIT 20 Ensemble and the Music Factory festival in Bergen. In the early 1990s he helped found Opera Vest in Bergen, now the Bergen National Opera. He was President of Ny Musikk (the Norwegian ISCM) from 1989 to 1995, during which Norway hosted the ISCM World Music Days in 1990. From 1998 to 2009 he was Artistic and Managing Director of the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, and he helped create the Réseau Varèse network in 1999.

From 2003 he developed Parkteatret, a downtown Oslo concert hall with about 250 events a year, operating without public funding. In 2005 he founded Transposition, a large-scale music cooperation between Norwegian and Vietnamese institutions, and later contributed to the HEDDA Foundation’s project to build the Gitameit Music School in Yangon, Myanmar.

Johnson lectured worldwide on 20th‑century music and cultural politics and published essays and reviews in roughly 100 journals. He received several awards, including the Fegersten Foundation Music Prize in 2002, a 2015 Hanoi medal for his work in Vietnamese music life, and the TONO Outreach Prize in 2016. He also served on the boards of various Norwegian cultural organizations and, from 2015, was chairman of Oslo’s MELA Festival and the Valdres Sommersymfoni.